Jade: Outlaw (click here to preview on Amazon Kindle now)

Everyone knew who he was. His name was Riley O’Connor but he was known as Jade.

“I don’t know if I could do it, but he did the right thing,” men confessed to their wives who shuddered thinking of the awful choice a man had to make. “If he had anything that could be called luck, it would be that they didn’t have no children.”

Boys played like they were Jade. “I don’t want to do it but it’s what I have to do,” they said, their make-believe six-shooters aimed at a friend’s heart. Sometimes they killed Indians with sticks that were make-believe knives like the one Jade had.

The settlement was too small to have a name or a street, just footpaths called Barefoot and Moccasin Streets. It was a place on the freight wagon trail between San Antonio and El Paso, a track that narrowed to the springs like a river narrowed to its source and then threaded out again as travelers chose the shortest, smoothest, easiest or safest way and those depended on the Indians, the weather and the time of year.

Where the trail narrowed people had pulled close, held together by fear. The trail ran past a store, a church, a saloon, a blacksmith shop, to the springs. The houses looked another way as though they were not part of the movement and commerce.

The store supplied wagon trains, cavalry patrols, scouts, adventurers, outlaws, cowmen. One cowman, called the general by his cowboys and the Big Augur in the settlement, built a house near the store for his wife, daughters, teenage boy, and his stove-up father, Shep, so they would be safer during Indian raids. One daughter had been killed by Indians. One son just curled up and died; no one knew why. Cletis, the teenager who survived, lived in town with his mother but carried messages to the bare wood, dirt-floored house that was his father’s headquarters. The general visited them when he came in a wagon for supplies, accompanied by a few cowboys for his protection and their chance to toss a few drinks and bounce the whore.

Another cowman was called El Jefe by his pistoleros who spoke with a Spanish accent. Proper names were scarce between the Devils River and the Pecos. Jefe built a house for his wife, young children and his wife’s parents on the other side of the trail from the general, and lived in a rag house near the chuck wagon. Their cowboys needed a place to howl and that meant a saloon with a shack in the back. Trail traffic required a blacksmith shop, and all those sinners needed a church. It was a free country.

Kindle provides a download of a free sample on their site.

Dusk Before the Dawn, Ketchersid’s first novel, is now available for Kindle, Nook and other formats. This book was a Finalist for the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year awards in 2006.

Also, look for The Last Klick by Robert Flynn to be available in Kindle format soon. Originally published in 1994, this is the story of war correspondent Sherrill O’Connell, who heads to Vietnam to escape the death of his daughter. What he finds there is a world of unreality, distorted by the new media. Because of an instinctive reaction to sudden danger, he becomes a hero. His own story becomes the good news that Americans want to hear.

I’ve read many books about the Great War and about Stalingrad and the other horrors of World War Two, but THE LAST KLICK, because it comes out of a contemporary sensibility, presents a greater challenge to the feelings. The madness of jungle warfare is matched moreover by the wicked idiocy of press and television. The United States seen from Vietnam is even more distorting than the experiences of combat. Written with passion and great skill — SAUL BELLOW

Twenty odd years ago, I had the pleasure of spending a few days traveling around Vietnam with Robert Flynn who was then a freelance correspondent for True Magazine. Now, after finishing THE LAST KLICK, I know what he was really up to. He has done a wonderful job of recreating the sights and sounds and smells fo Vietnam, and he has captured the ambitions, pretensions and cynicism of the international press corps that covered the war. — STEVE KROFT, 60 Minutes (CBS)